You know what would be good for your skin? Radium.

Yesterday, I went to the Curie Museum in Paris and learned about how Marie Curie discovered radium (and eventually died from exposure to it. Pierre Curie died in more mundane circumstances; he was ran over by a horse carriage.) You can only visit a reconstitution of her laboratory because the real thing was so contaminated that it had to be destroyed. Her notebooks are at the National Library in a lead box. They too are radioactive.

What was fascinating is that there was a period in the 1910s, 20s and 30s when the downside of radium was not known; only its benefits. Some entrepreneurs therefore started putting radium in different consumer goods such as make up. The cosmetic brand Tho-Radia advertised that radium would smoothe out any skin. People also added radium to baths (The baths were enthusiastically advertised as "highly radioactive!") and drank radium in their water!!! According to the tour guide, they did not survive.